Page 41 of Stolen Hearts

He doesn’t say anything. But something begins to burn inside of me. Something sparks to life as he stands there, glowering at me.

Something that has me stepping closer to him. I reach out, but Castle’s jaw clenches, and he steps away from me.

My eyes raise to his as my lips sucks between my teeth. “What are you so scared of?”

He laughs coldly. “I’m not scared of anything.”

“Are you worried about touching me because of my brothers?”

“I’m worried that you’renotscared of me.”

I gasp as he surges into me, grabbing one of my wrists as he leans down close to my face.

Really close. Closer than he’s been since the kiss.

“Because, sweetheart…” he rasps darkly. “You fucking should be.”

I’m still shivering when he lets me go. My pulse is still roaring in my ears as he whirls and storms over to the door. Just before he opens it, he turns, and those piercing eyes stab into me.

“Happy birthday, Callie,” he growls quietly.

Then he leaves.

10

CASTLE

The next fewdays are a blur. And as annoyed as I initially was about Cillian preemptively putting my name before the Irish Council of Clans before I even agreed to the whole plan, now that things are in motion, it’s a good thing he did.

It turns out that the “mourning period” outlined in the contract that Elsa was talking about…the little window Callie gets to “find comfort in and fall in love with someone else”…

…istwo fucking weeks.

Meaning we need to get marriedyesterday.

I’m not sure what sort of pomp and circumstance I was expecting to change the head of an Irish mafia family, but I was definitely thinking some sort of ceremony. A knighting involving a fucking sword or something? Maybe in a weighty, somber cathedral?

Nope. It’s none of those things. We meet in a room above O’Bannon’s, an Irish pub in midtown, with Eamon Gallagher and Brian Fitzpatrick, two of the major Irish family heads from Ireland who sit on the Council of Clans: me, Cillian, Eamon and Brian, and Neve, Eilish, and Una, just because they want to be there for it.

There’s no cathedral. No sword. I swear to uphold the rule and the will of the Council, and to put my family first. That part’s easy. I might not be a Kildare by birth, but they’re the only real family I’ve ever had.

At least, the only functional one.

The only one that’s still alive.

The first one I knew was broken before I was even born into it. My father was a monster, and my mother his apathetic enabler.

Then there was Kelly, my little sister. The only good thing I can think of from that period of my life. But she was gone far too soon. Cruelly taken from this world by the very man who brought both of us into it.

The man we called “dad”, whom I later killed with my bare hands.

The army is how I avoided jail. And it was the Rangers who showed me how to be a man. How to tap into that rage and fury inside of my heart and channel it correctly. That became the next family I knew: my special ops unit that consisted of Jeremy, Matt, Bryce, Jason, and myself.

I wouldn’t call it particularly functional, or all that healthy. No family that exists in nearly perpetual violence and warfare can call itself healthy. But it was what it was, and it was what I needed during those years between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three.

Until an IED bolted to the kitchen table of a house we were breaching went off in their faces.

Then most of that family died.

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